Agreed entirely. Sadly it seems they want to avoid that at all costs. I can't say I blame them too much, though; it'd be a massive workload to essentially double the spellbook of every player and keep them both updated for each patch.

Not necessarily. Each spell has their own variable for their base spell damage yes? Just add another one, and apply a simple condition checking if the target is a player or not. If it is, it uses value A, otherwise it uses value B. They already have this for some spells, such as heroic throw with the glyph checking if it should or shouldn't silence the target.

It might be a bit of work to set it up at first, but afterwards it will be so easy to change around in the balance of the respective field without even having to consider how it would affect the other that it's not even funny.

The tool tips would perhaps become a little bit longer, having two lines in its description, one explaining the damage on an NPC, and one explaining the damage on a Player. But really, it would perhaps be confusing for some people for like one week, then they would most likely understand that it's a great and well needed change.

and no, you cant stop frost bomb, not with the fire blast glyph. cant dispel what goes off instantly.

two things.

one. you can kick frost bombs.

two. you have to wait a fraction of a second before exploding frost bomb with glyph. queueing up a fireblast in mid frostbomb cast does not work. you have to give the servers time to recognize there's a frostbomb debuff on the target. so any decent healer can time their dispels to land faster than a mage can explode it.

Not necessarily. Each spell has their own variable for their base spell damage yes? Just add another one, and apply a simple condition checking if the target is a player or not. If it is, it uses value A, otherwise it uses value B. They already have this for some spells, such as heroic throw with the glyph checking if it should or shouldn't silence the target.

You have a point. I guess I'm a bit doubtful that they'd bother with it or actually have the ability to do such currently. The two damage dealing effects in recent history that have been massively different in PVE and PVP (3.3-5.0 deep freeze and stormbolt) have been based on a stun check. I'm guessing the silence on gag order is coded more like curse of doom used to be, in which that the silence spell just can't be used on players and won't fire in PVP. They likely don't have, as of current, a mechanic to switch between two different damage sets on a single spell based on purely PVP vs PVE alone.

It might be a bit of work to set it up at first, but afterwards it will be so easy to change around in the balance of the respective field without even having to consider how it would affect the other that it's not even funny.

Oh I'm well aware. I still doubt it'll happen. They've stated multiple times that they're against that type of split except in extreme circumstances. I have to wonder if any of the devs actually get some form of entertainment from keeping classes and specs shuffled around, or if they just fire nerf guns at a board with targets to determine buffs/nerfs and revel in the chaos that ensues on class boards.

Except it does have a fair sized effect on PVE. It's our only bomb choice for large scale AOE, and is very slightly better than the other two bombs for frost single target. Frost bomb shatter combos is one of the only reasons I kept up DPS with the others on challenge mode trash. Even if you made the frostbolt buff a passive part of taking frost bomb, our AOE is screwed. Moving the damage into ice lance? Are you crazy? At least you can interrupt and dispel frost bomb, could you imagine the tears if one of our instants gets buffed? And what of the other two specs? They'd get nothing out of nerfing frost bomb, and they'd never end up using it because it became inferior to the other two.

Look, it's going to hit hard. That's how the spell works. It's a DoT compressed into one blast. It's got to be worth the GCD spent for damage, so it's going to always have a decently high DPCT because it has to beat just about everything else. It has to be on par, single target PVE damage-wise, with the other two bomb spells. The cooldown and duration almost (brain freeze procs aside) entirely don't matter, because as long as it can be done when deep freeze is up, there will be tears; not to mention that if the cooldown was longer, the damage would be higher to match the overall DPCT of the other bombs in that duration. Even if you were to make deep freeze a 2m CD to match trinket, good mages will start throwing nova or freeze just as it goes off, and the tears will continue just as they are today. Removing it from shatter breaks us in challenge modes and feels clunky to have one spell, a frost one, not benefit from shatter.

Short of redesigning the spec so the mastery isn't +shatter damage, I honestly don't see a decent solution that works in both PVP and PVE. This isn't as simple as nerfing a spec, this is a talent available to all three mage specs and is quite balanced in relation to the other two choices in single target PVE, and has a place among the three in AOE PVE. Flat out nerfing it hurts all mage specs, and removes a talent from viability.

Edit: Okay, I lied. They could change frost bomb to 2 single hits, each for half of what it does now. I don't believe that it'd be possible to hit both in the same deep freeze, but it has awkward implications regarding brain freeze.

So this may sound dumb or something, but if it is a compressed DoT, and that compression is making it do way to much burst (I think everyone agrees on that), why not "uncompress" it? Maybe have it separated into little blasts, all doing aoe (kind of like Living Bomb, but every blast does aoe(and it could have another effect like proccing shit or something).
I know you already have Living Bomb and that could make the spell too much alike, but I don't see much exits out of this. Another solution would be lowering the burst damage and move it into castable spells (maybe also raise the AE coefficient for you PvE AE whores).

But I think that the smartest thing to do, is change glyph of fire blast to: Your Fire Blast ... causes Frost bomb to instantly explode for 70%(made up number, maybe higher maybe lower) of it's normal damage. This would reduce the on-demand burst and make mages choose between burst and lower damage or letting things roll and do more damage over-time, draining more mana from the healer (Something I think PvP should focus on more instead of stupid high burst). I know this would be a big change but I think it would be more balanced.

for the record, everything has to be popped (both damage trinkets, jade spirit and tailoring enchant) for me to POSSIBLY score a kill inside a deep freeze on an equivalently geared/skilled player. thats assuming neither of his partners are peeling for them or healing them. i can say though that yes, i have scored kills in the first 5 seconds of an arena match just completely catching them off guard and getting all my stuff to proc. is it fair? i think so, its all about reaction timing on their part, they could definitely have reacted and helped themselves/their partner. hell, look at all the close calls venruki/snutz had trying to score kills in the world championship. they would get their opponents low but its not like their target was falling over, there is always something you or your team mates can do to counter you.

back on topic though, frost bomb damage will be fixed with the hotfix to on use trinkets. at least frost bomb can be stopped and only has the potential to do 50-60% (not saying thats okay by any means, id say it should be good for 30-40% though), chaos wave was just retarded. any lock worth anything, over 2100~, was two shotting people. the abilities would be comparable if mages had an arcane power type ability as frost to increase the damage further.

id rather see a longer cooldown rather than such a drastic damage reduction to frost bomb. then at least its something to look out for. when youre constantly saving your dispells/interrupts for one specific ability every 9 seconds when you come across an enemy team with a mage, its not very fun.

This just proves the point, It is ridiculous to score kills in the first 5 seconds whichever way you put it, Mages take half your health in the first 5 second gauranteed, more or less making it a definitive loss in 2's or in 3's combined with ferals or other heavy burst classes you are fucked aswell.

Demo barely gets played at high arena level because dark soul is so easily ccable, and other classes; ahem like mages do more damage and have more cc. Only reason it got played anyway was because of all the isnta casts and the pet stun, as opposed to wet noodling as affli.

And did you just compare warlock as op as to having meta? Frost mage has not been appropriatly nerfed, bringing down deep freeze to 3 second would be fair, nerfing icelance and perhaps slightly buffing frostbolt would help, also symbiosis druid combo's add at mages op ness and wantedness in arena. Top frost mages are truly good and if nthey can get a good kill in sure. But googling "one shot macro" copy pasting it shouldnt get you a decent arena rating.

two. you have to wait a fraction of a second before exploding frost bomb with glyph. queueing up a fireblast in mid frostbomb cast does not work. you have to give the servers time to recognize there's a frostbomb debuff on the target. so any decent healer can time their dispels to land faster than a mage can explode it.

one. you can't stop every frost bomb, sometimes no one can connect to the mage to stop it.

two. the healer is not going to be able to dispel every frost bomb. maybe hes feared/silenced/stunned/on cd.

three. how do you stop PoM as a team with no offensive dispel?

should you be punished for letting a mage get that cast off? sure. but frost bombs deal excessive amounts of damage, and a mage can potentially frost bomb a lot more often then you have defensive cds to deal with it

sure, chaos wave was strong, but a lock needed to use dark soul, and only got this burst window every 2 minutes.

frost mages have a window to kill a player every 30 seconds, without cooldowns, via deep freeze.

how is this in ANY way fair or balanced.

Let me get this right, what you are saying is 'you suck at PvP and you want Blizzard to nerf the ones kicking your ass so you dont feel so bad, and you dont give a shit about how it affects any other part of the game'...

Next time if you dont want that kind of response then you might want to come up with a different approach, and for the record I'm GLAD that Blizzard ignores tantrums and acts on well reasoned posts.

--- Want any of my Constitutional rights?, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
I come from a time and a place where I judge people by the content of their character; I don't give a damn if you are tall or short; gay or straight; Jew or Gentile; White, Black, Brown or Green; Conservative or Liberal.

How can people even try to justify Frostbomb? and dont say that its just low players i might not be top 10 but i sure am above 2200 and it happends when you meet frostmages/warrior/randomhealer that the mages crit us for 200k+ with just frostbomb and that is just stupid

Let me get this right, what you are saying is 'you suck at PvP and you want Blizzard to nerf the ones kicking your ass so you dont feel so bad, and you dont give a shit about how it affects any other part of the game'...

Next time if you dont want that kind of response then you might want to come up with a different approach, and for the record I'm GLAD that Blizzard ignores tantrums and acts on well reasoned posts.

Well this is an MMO forum, it is implied you read through to the essence of the post, which is that is if you would ask arena players to rate the most annoying and imbalanced things in pvp the list would most likely include chaos wave and symbiosis, but at the sheer top of the list is frost bomb/ mage openers. After the recent nerfs to insane burst from hunters and warriors you would expect the obvious would be blizzard take a look at the damage coefficients of mages, sure there was a nerf, but any mage that can pom a rof can solo any 2's comp in damage, check ziqo's stream and tell me its just his skill that he is soloing people. Id like to see him go affli, demo, or destro and try it

It will take months of them "analyzing the situation" before they realize it's too powerful. I'd say wait until 5.2 or next summer for any substantial pvp changes.

Here's how it generally works:

QQer: OMG, frost bomb just crit me for 200k and I have full pvp gear, please nerf mages omg
Blizzard: I'm sorry but we don't make changes just because the community asks for them. We design the game as we see fit and mages are working as intended. Maybe you should L2P

4 months later
Blizzard: We've discovered that frost bomb is dealing too much damage and we've decided to nerf it

Well this is an MMO forum, it is implied you read through to the essence of the post, which is that is if you would ask arena players to rate the most annoying and imbalanced things in pvp the list would most likely include chaos wave and symbiosis, but at the sheer top of the list is frost bomb/ mage openers. After the recent nerfs to insane burst from hunters and warriors you would expect the obvious would be blizzard take a look at the damage coefficients of mages, sure there was a nerf, but any mage that can pom a rof can solo any 2's comp in damage, check ziqo's stream and tell me its just his skill that he is soloing people. Id like to see him go affli, demo, or destro and try it

My entire point was QQing about it and raging about it HERE is POINTLESS. Write a well thoughtout post, offer solid information, and THEN, if you post it to the right place Blizzard will eventually look at it...

--- Want any of my Constitutional rights?, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
I come from a time and a place where I judge people by the content of their character; I don't give a damn if you are tall or short; gay or straight; Jew or Gentile; White, Black, Brown or Green; Conservative or Liberal.

Look, it's going to hit hard. That's how the spell works. It's a DoT compressed into one blast. It's got to be worth the GCD spent for damage, so it's going to always have a decently high DPCT because it has to beat just about everything else.

Frost bomb takes what 6 seconds at most to explode if you dont ignite it and hits for 140k. So that would be 2 ticks for dot. Huh I didn't know my shadow word: pain could tick for 70k last I checked it was only 5k.

Frost bomb takes what 6 seconds at most to explode if you dont ignite it and hits for 140k. So that would be 2 ticks for dot. Huh I didn't know my shadow word: pain could tick for 70k last I checked it was only 5k.

I post this in nearly every thread which has Frost bomb in the title. It's such an easy way out that has no effect on PvE and would increase the skillcap in PvP. Getting a frostbomb cast off in a 3s arena game isn't hard especially if the target is deeped or ringed and the partners are ringed/feared/cloned etc.

Getting frost bolt casts off would be much harder.

Incorrect. This would just be a buff to PvE since PvE frost mages are currently using nether tempest.

Its really funny to see how mages defent themselves against their Opness.Yes warlocks should not be nerfed in any way and yes mages were-are-will be OP so no worries.Dispells-Def CDs etc are worthless since u will just (in the best scenario) loose ur 1shot combo but in the end u will cc the "dispeller" and kill him few min later.Please......

I guess the developers agree that mage burst is still ridiculous.
I think the easiest would be to tone down Frostbomb damage by making it more akin to the other bombs, and reworking Fireblast glyph into something else.

Oh lord, this thread...
It's quite simple actually. The warlock does not need to use a single casted spell. All the demo has is instant. You can't stop it. Fear is instant, Poly is not. Chaos Waves are instant, Frost Bomb is not. Frost Bomb DOES get dispelled, Chaos Wave does not.
Also lemme tell you that the mage actually has to set the kill up. It's much harder than it looks especially since mages usually get trained most of the arena match.

Y'all need to go roll a mage and then come back and tell me how you got destroyed by a warrior's 200k heroic strike in your face. Or a how good it feels to get hit by DK's Oblit for 50k non-crit... followed by a 100k crit of course.